The sharp decline in oil prices has put pressure on a range of companies in the energy sector.Credit LM Otero/Associated Press

The Carlyle Group reported lower fourth-quarter profit on Wednesday, weighed down by declines in its energy investments and its hedge funds, but the results exceeded analysts’ expectations.

Carlyle, the Washington-based private equity giant, said that its quarterly economic net income — a measure of profit that includes unrealized gains or losses — declined 68 percent, to $180.5 million, compared with results in the period a year earlier.

Still, the profit, which amounted to 56 cents a share after taxes, beat the expectations of 44 cents by analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. And Carlyle said its full-year profit viewed through the lens of distributable earnings — which shows the cash generated by the business — was its highest since going public in 2012.

Turmoil in the energy sector in the last part of 2014 hurt a number of private equity firms, which had invested heavily in oil and gas companies. Carlyle, which owns stakes in energy funds raised by another firm, Riverstone Holdings, suffered as holdings like the Canadian oil company Northern Blizzard Resources and the compression service provider USA Compression lost large portions of their market value in the quarter.

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David Rubenstein, co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group.Credit Drew Angerer for The New York Times

Carlyle said declines in such energy investments shaved 12 percentage points off the performance of its portfolio of publicly traded investments. That portfolio appreciated 7 percent in the quarter, while the portfolio of private investments declined 1 percent.

At the same time, Carlyle, like its rivals, is hoping to use the sector’s weakness as an opportunity to make new investments. The firm is nearly done raising an international energy fund that is expected to total about $2.5 billion in assets, and it is also raising a fund to invest in power plants and similar assets. In total, Carlyle has about $9 billion in capital ready to invest in energy.

“With our major funds reloaded, we are well positioned to take advantage of market volatility, particularly in the energy sector,” William E. Conway Jr., a co-chief executive, said in a statement.

But energy was not the only factor weighing on the firm’s fourth-quarter results. Carlyle said it did not collect any realized net performance fees — a crucial source of profit — from an important hedge fund portfolio in the fourth quarter because the funds did not appreciate enough to allow the firm to do so.

The global market strategies unit, in which these funds are housed, reported just $5 million of realized net performance fees in the quarter, compared with $79 million in the period a year earlier. The unit’s funds declined 2 percent in the quarter, compared with a 10 percent appreciation in the period a year earlier.

Carlyle also reported an economic net loss in real estate, an area that traditionally has been a source of weakness. The firm said it realized losses on a loan to one of its European real estate funds and on its investment in a Brazilian real estate developer that it has been trying to turn around.

As it raised new funds, Carlyle said its assets under management rose to $194.5 billion at the end of the year, compared with $188.8 billion a year earlier.

Carlyle’s overall business generated a significant, though comparatively low, amount of cash in the last three months of the year. Distributable earnings totaled $310.6 million in the quarter, 22 percent lower than in the period a year earlier. The firm declared a quarterly dividend of $1.61 a share.

For the full year, distributable earnings were $973.2 million, 16 percent higher than in 2013.

“This was our best year as a public company,” David M. Rubenstein, a co-chief executive, said in the statement.

A version of this article appears in print on 02/12/2015, on page B5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Carlyle Group Profit Falls.